Developing partnerships is an essential skill for scaling businesses. Strategically aligning and collaborating with other companies can provide access to new markets, resources, and expertise that can accelerate progress and drive success. Your company can tap into new opportunities and achieve mutual benefits by joining forces with the right partners. Partnerships also play a crucial role in innovation. Companies can collaborate on research and development by bringing together different perspectives and skill sets and creating innovative products and solutions. In today's fast-paced business environment, staying competitive often requires adapting and innovating, and partnerships can be a powerful tool in achieving these goals.
Partnerships also seem to be becoming a requirement for most companies. McKinsey predicts that the channel ecosystem model will hit $60 Trillion by 2025 (yes, that is now less than a year away) and will represent 30% of the global economy. Customers increasing demand for unified experiences that meld multiple companies, products, and services is driving this economic shift and if your company isn't ready to meet this customer demand, it could be a very costly mistake.
As the market trends shift towards the ecosystem economy, many companies are eager to jump into partnerships. However, before doing so, it is wise to take a step back and carefully assess your readiness to partner. This will not only save you time and money but also ensure that you have the right talent and partners to succeed in this new landscape.
Designing, developing, and cultivating partnerships is not just a revenue or marketing tactic, but it will push your operations, product development, brand, and culture in a different direction. Your leadership needs to be ready, willing, and able to move and adapt to these shifts in ways that will be a benefit to your company, not turn into a hindrance.
Lastly, one thing many companies don't consider when launching into partnerships is the impact you'll have on other businesses. You need to ensure you can keep the promises you are making and be accountable to the partners you're recruiting.
Assessing your company's resources and expertise is crucial in determining its partnership capacity. This involves identifying the resources and capabilities your company brings to the table and understanding how they can complement those of potential partners. It's important to assess both tangible resources, such as financial resources, technology, and infrastructure, as well as intangible resources, such as intellectual property, patents, and brand value.
Additionally, evaluating your company's expertise and industry knowledge is essential. Understanding your company's strengths and areas of expertise will help you identify potential partnership opportunities that align with your core competencies. Conversely, knowing where your company has gaps or weak points will help you better identify the areas a partner can fill and support. By leveraging your existing resources and expertise and knowing where you have needs to fill, you can create synergies with partners and maximize the value generated from working together.
To identify potential partners, you need a well-thought-out strategy. Begin by identifying your Ideal Partner Profile (IPP) and clearly defining your objectives and the attributes you're seeking in a partner. Consider factors like industry expertise, geographic reach, customer base, and value alignment to determine the characteristics your ideal partner should have.
It may also help to segment your partners into different focus areas and needs and develop an IPP for each segment. For instance, what you need in a technology partner may be very different than what you need in a services partner.
To test out your IPP, engage with target partner companies and conduct interviews to see if your assumptions related to their needs and strengths match what your company is searching for in a partner. By using Crossbeam or Reveal, you may also want to do some preliminary customer cross-referencing to see how aligned your customer bases and target markets are.
Knowing who you want to partner with is the easy part. Deciding how to engage, cultivate, and deploy those partners strategically and with impact is what will require your whole company to align around.
Starting with your company goals, begin identifying where your partnerships will contribute to their success and how you'll be measuring their impact on your objectives. Work with your functional areas (sales, marketing, operations, product, services, success, etc.) to build in activities and dependencies around partners to ensure there is alignment across the organization and, more importantly, a deeper understanding among your teams as to how your company interacts with the larger sector ecosystem you operate within.
As part of your strategy, identify your executive sponsors who will hold the company accountable for partnership success. Create a regular cadence of accountability check-ins, progress evaluations, and most importantly, meetings with your most critically and strategically aligned partners.
By taking time to clearly identify your partners, evaluate your capacity and willingness to work with partners, and to develop a strategy aligned to all areas of your company, you'll see your intended results with your partners more quickly.
If you're interested in working with CollabUnity to assess your company's readiness to partner and to receive personalized recommendations for your team.
*AI was used to help write this article.